‘You’ve got mail on now!’ grinned Gille. ‘Should keep your saddle-polisher intact, more or less!’
When the watchers saw Kermorvan’s black banner they cheered and capered, and some rushed on to the bridge to meet him. ‘Get your ratty arses off, you silly buggers!’ was his greeting. ‘You’ll have us all in the water!’
They laughed, and drew back. The old man reined in by the wagons, and glared around from beneath his bristling brows. ‘Thanks for your aid!’ he growled. ‘If we get all this done aright, you’ll have your carts back in time to load your harvest in – and with no sweat keepin’ it from thievin’ corsairs, neither! But look’ee here, you—’ He fixed one inoffensive man with a terrible glare and jabbed a knob-knuckled finger. ‘None o’ this skulkin’ and mutterin’ from now on, see? I’ll not have it! Anything smells, no matter who’s got his boot in it, it’s my business to know, see? And yours to come runnin’, rumour or no! That’s called duty, that is, and don’t you dare forget it! That’s what lords are for!’ His scowl turned to a horrible grin, evidently meant to be reassuring. ‘I won’t bite your heads off. Not that you’d miss ’em! My gate’s open to any man, be it Lord Muck or the muck-shoveller. That’s how my folk ordered it in the East, that’s how it’ll be now I’m here – or I’ll know why!’ He treated them to another glare. ‘Right then! Piss off inside with you and report to the captain!’
No gem of oratory, but it roused a healthy cheer – far more, Kunrad realised, than Merthian’s polished politeness would have done. Kermorvan’s bluntness spoke more directly, and with more authority. But as his men rode by, he muttered, ‘Let’s hope we’re still behind the bloody gate!’
‘You will be,’ said Kunrad encouragingly. ‘We’ll see to that! That gulf you spoke of – it’s the same between North and South, isn’t it?’
‘First things first!’ said Kermorvan. ‘Let’s find this ore of yours and put an edge on it first. There’s a mort of cutting comes before the mending!’
The riders moved on past the slower wagons with their tall ox-teams, man-high at the shoulder, which were to meet them at a camping place just below the mouth of the main pass into the mountains. ‘I’ll need somewhere where the earth is cut into, and the layers of rock beneath laid bare,’ Kunrad explained to Alais. ‘Then I can look for the types of stone best suited to bearing metal, and find the seam the pebbles come from!’
‘Long as it’s not all been worn to pebbles long since,’ said Kermorvan. He had turned gloomy again, and all Alais’s prodding and persuasion couldn’t cheer him up. The few folk who lived out in these parts, most of them hunters and outlivers, looked with little favour on their search. They were afraid of the high passes, not so much for the mountains themselves as the mountain spirits who dwelt there, whom they feared might well be angered by any such intrusion. But as they reached the camping-ground Alais had picked out and halted to make fire and feed, Kunrad surveyed the mighty walls of stone before him with deep satisfaction, and the valley mouths that opened within them.
‘Up there!’ said Alais. ‘The tallest. I think that’s a place after your mind. When I was a girl the rock layers always looked to me like birthday cake.’
Kunrad nodded. ‘Like enough. We could take a ride up there, look around and be back before dark! Come, lads!’
The prentices surveyed the high cliff walls, and the greying cloud that swirled above their summits and streamed like winter’s banner from the peaks. ‘Looks like a perfect place for your mountain spirits, doesn’t it?’ groaned Olvar. ‘Lots of nice pointy rocks to drop on us, clouds to lose us in, cliffs to lead us over!’
‘That’s so!’ admitted Gille. ‘But you’re forgetting one thing. If there are any mountain spirits up there, they’re between the Mastersmith and something he wants!’
Olvar though for a moment. ‘Feel a touch sorry for ’em, now you mention it.’
‘Me too,’ said Gille.
‘You think he’s like that?’ inquired Alais, a little wanly. ‘When he really, truly wants something?’
The prentices greeted her warmly. ‘My lady,’ said Gille after a moment. ‘He’s like an awful lot of men, really. He has to know he wants it, first.’
The light was greying as they rode up the steep paths, but it still shone bright on the upper slopes, and would hold until long into the summer evening. It was a beautiful ride, though rather a steep one; but Kunrad had eyes for neither heights nor depths – only the path around him, and the scattered falls of rock from the mountain wall. Every so often he would leap down, ignoring the drop to his right, and exclaim with satisfaction over some rock or other.
‘There’s a whole fall of them here!’ he exclaimed, as they emerged into a wide gorge at the foot of two real peaks, in the centre of which a mountain stream had worn a shallow tarn before escaping to the vales below. He pointed to a brownish slash among the white rubble of the hillside. ‘See, scattered like that, right out across the slope there. Strange, that … Such a lot of it, and so regular. Almost as if …’
‘As if someone’s been mining it already?’ demanded Gille, rubbing his neck as the hairs prickled. The wind was whistling through the gorge now, and but for the stream’s dull splashing, it was the only voice they heard. Yet each and every one of them felt as if they had overheard the echo of a whisper, a departing footfall, glimpsed a flicker of movement. It was as if the gorge had just that moment fallen empty, and its watchers remained alert and expectant around them.
It was an eerie moment; but the next sound they heard carried a more definite fear. Every man’s back twitched at the faint clickings that carried down the wind, as if stiffening his shoulders might somehow stop the crossbow bolts aimed between them. Kermorvan swung around with a stifled oath, caught Kunrad’s arm and pointed. A single pebble was tumbling down from the high outcrops along the right-hand wall, impossibly high for a man to climb, down in great bouncing leaps across the barren stoneface, until it rebounded off a shelf some thirty feet above their heads and down through the rubble of the fall, to roll across the path immediately before their horses’ hooves. A trickle of disturbed pebbles pattered down behind it. In the silence it left there was a new sound, a kind of faint insistent sizzle, and the wind carried a sudden acrid whiff of burning.
‘Who d’you think this is?’ whispered Kermorvan.
‘Not spirits, anyhow,’ said Kunrad. ‘Too material. A penny piece to a pint mug it’s …’
Kermorvan gestured, as if he did not want the name spoken. He rose in his stirrups to shout out, but his throat was evidently ash-dry. He swallowed as best he could, and called out between his cupped hands. ‘We mean no harm! We come in peace! Metal is all we seek!’
He had not bargained for the effect of the echoes. The sounds they had magnified must have been very faint, for they made his loud words boom alarmingly off the walls and into the wind. SEEK … HARM … METAL … from every direction around them, like titanic mockery. The effect was not exactly reassuring.
‘Let me!’ said Kunrad swiftly. ‘If they turn us away now, we’re done. But if not … Will you go along with whatever I say?’
‘Well … it depends …’
‘Will you? Nothing dishonourable, that I promise – but there’s no time to explain!’
Kermorvan groaned. ‘More hot water for you to tip me into … But I’ve trusted you this far, boy. Say on – but have a care!’
Kunrad raised his hands and took a deep breath. ‘Hear me! I am no enemy to the duergar race, whom I guess you to be! I have spoken with your kind before!’ He pitched his voice higher than Kermorvan’s boom, and it carried more clearly through the echoes. ‘I am the mastersmith out of Nordeney who helped two of your kind escape the corsairs’ fortress! And though I claim no special credit, let it stand that it was me and mine who threw down the gibbets at a certain crossways!’
He sagged down, listening to the silence. ‘Nothing’s happening!’
‘That can be a lot better than something, believe me!’ ru
mbled Kermorvan softly. ‘Try again!’
‘We face the corsairs now!’ he called again. ‘Your foe and ours! We need metal for sword and spear-point! If you will not aid us, at least do not hinder us!’
There was only silence.
‘The corsairs!’ he shouted again. ‘And behind them, the Ice whose instruments they are! Would you have the high vales and foothills under their cruel hand? This man at my side is a great lord of the Southlands, of their line of kings. If you help us, actively help us, he’ll give you his word to forbid the killing of your kind like vermin. The killing and the gibbeting – forbid it, by law. Will the corsairs ever do that?’
‘What?’ rumbled Kermorvan.
‘Do it!’ snapped Alais. ‘Do it, Father. We’ve no choice now.’
Kermorvan’s cheeks flared for a moment, then he subsided. ‘Well, well. Never did like that, I’ll allow. One o’ those beastly sheepshagger customs.’ The old man raised his hand in solemn assent.
‘You’ve done something!’ said Alais shakily, almost at once.
After a moment longer Gille nodded. ‘Something’s changed!’
It was strange how the quality of silence could alter. It had not lost its menace, but it seemed less immediate now, more expectant.
‘Thank you!’ shouted Kunrad, and added under his breath, ‘Now for the push!’
He cupped his hands again. ‘You! You could find the iron for us, far faster than we could!’ He drew breath. That was what had changed! The vicious hiss had stilled. ‘If we return here, say tomorrow at noon, with our men and beasts, will you guide us to what we need?’
Silence; and now it was hard to read. But then suddenly, from high on the left-hand walls of the gorge, another and smaller pebble came falling, freely now, arcing high out into space to strike nothing until it exploded before their feet. Their horses shied; and as they struggled to soothe them, they saw, impossibly high above, gleams of metal. All along the precipitous slopes they stood out in the low long sunbeams, and lower, from minor rock and hidden crevice, until the gorge winked and sparkled like a mine of jewels. They were squat, burly figures all clad in shining armour, and Kunrad’s mouth watered as he longed to get at it and winkle out its secrets and shapings. He peered and squinted, missing completely what everyone else saw at once.
‘There’s bloody hundreds of ’em!’ wheezed Kermorvan shakily. ‘And what’s that bugger up i’ the top doing?’
Kunrad strained his eyes as the bright shape raised a hand, palm outward. He could almost make out the articulation. It was a segmented scale construction, sprung on sliding rivets probably, like his! It was only then he recognised the gesture. It looked like an echo of Kermorvan’s. Then the armour flashed again, and there was no mistaking that calm downward wave. They were being told to go. Again the open palm; again the wave. Then the figure turned away, and almost as one the gleams along the gorge winked out. It was as if the hillside had swallowed them.
Kermorvan wheeled his horse, and chivvied the others. Alais and Olvar pulled Kunrad along, because he kept turning to look back up the gorge into the deepening shadows. Kermorvan rode his horse close, demanding under his breath, ‘Did the little bugger really accept?’
‘I don’t know!’ admitted Kunrad. ‘I hope so. It looked like it. If the duergar can keep so close a watch and summon such a force, there’ll be nowhere else we can go, not in the time. And you saw them! That armour is superb … Kermorvan, these aren’t wild men!’
‘They ain’t exactly chambermaids, boy!’ rumbled the older man.
‘I mean they’ve arts and crafts of civilisation. And numbers. They can keep us out of the mountains if they want. Kermorvan, you’d be well advised to stop this killing anyway, whether they help or not.’
‘Mmmh. You mean to go back?’
‘Yes! What else can I do? That gesture … And that armour! It could hold the answer … We’ll have to see, won’t we?’
Kunrad hardly heard the call to supper that evening. Alais went in search of him with a steaming bowl, and found him sitting under a tree some way off, the smith’s book on his knee, scratching figures in the earth with a stick. ‘One minute more and you can wear this as a helmet!’ she warned him. ‘About fit for keeping those addled brains of yours in! Is it that accursed armour again?’
Kunrad’s stick slashed away what he had been drawing, and he sprang to his feet. ‘Why not?’ he demanded savagely. ‘I was shaped to make it, wasn’t I?’
‘I’m sorry!’ she said, backing off. ‘1 should never have said anything so stupid! There’s more to you than that, more that ’ that I admire. You’re strong and valiant, yet you’re not cruel and you’re not a bloody-minded soldier. You’re a craftsman, and yet you’re a scholar and more of a nobleman than many who bear the name. You have eyes, and you see sometimes. It’s just that it upsets me so, to find, at the heart of all that, nothing but this evil bloody armour!’
The twilight shadowed her face, but he could see the change in her whole stance, and the way the bowl shook ’m sorry. It was not the armour I was drawing but something else, an idea I had from that old book, and the notes of the duergar … Lady, this hold the armour has on me, it pains me also. Worse, because it so distresses you. I would never have that.’ He put out his hands to steady the bowl, and they met hers around it. She almost jerked them away, then realised that would spill the soup and held them there, stiff and tense.
‘What would you have, then?’ she demanded.
He gave a laugh that was almost a scoff, bitter and uneasy. ‘Oh, Powers! Many things! Peace of mind. Freedom. A new life! My old one’s eaten up like a fire that runs behind me. I am left only today, and what is to come. I could wish so many things ’ if only I felt I should!’
Her voice was unusually low and serious. ‘Maybe you should worry less about could and should. The future is hardly certain for any of us, is it? Perhaps the things you could wish are the making of it. If only you have the vision to reach out and take them.’
The bowl struck the ground with a soft thud, spilling its contents unheeded. His grip on her was almost violent, his hands twisting in her hair, forcing her head back as his encircling arms crushed her against him. Her hands were flat against his shoulders, her long fingers splayed and taut, yet she was not pushing him away so much as trying to hold off the same fierce movement in herself. His lips came down on hers and hesitated, for hers were drawn back in a fierce fixed grin, and he met only her sharp teeth. But at the first hint of withdrawal, her mouth clamped against his, wide open so that her tongue reached out and lapped against his lips. She drew him in as if he was the very air of life itself, and her startled shivers were as much at herself and the surging force within her. Her fingers clutched and clenched, then grabbed at his own trailing hair around the back of his neck. His grip relaxed an instant, and he felt her arms fly up, free, and lock around his neck as she ground her breasts against him, and then her thighs, almost shocking him with the animality of it, and the heat it aroused in answer.
Shadow claimed the world, but the blackness that took him was deeper. He saw and felt nothing save the pattern of her body as it moved against his own, almost as clearly as if they were naked. That thought set the darkness roaring, and tightened his temples. He was drowning in her; he had no breath but hers. He clutched at her, and they swayed, crumpling one another’s clothes in great handfuls, pulling the flesh bare. His hands slid over her, clothed, and she caught her breath at the intimacy of it; but when his hands returned there was no longer any barrier. Their mouths tore apart then, because they had to breathe; and they clung, dizzy, head to shoulder, his legs braced apart to bring them one against another. Instinct busied her hands as her head spun, and it was only gradually she felt him hesitate, and still his own questing fingers. She threw her head back, looking a wild question into his face. His eyes avoided hers; he jerked his head in the direction of the firelight, startlingly near.
‘We’ll go farther away, then …’ she said, and tugged at h
is hand. He shook his head. ‘What is it, then?’ she hissed, still trying to draw him on. ‘What’s the matter with you? I … You know, plague you! You love me, too!’
‘This isn’t right,’ Kunrad said slowly. ‘Yes, of course I… but this is ridiculous! You, me ’ you being what you are! Your father … I’m a foreigner, princess. An enemy, practically. Not even rich or important. I’ve made enough problems for other people already.’ He ran down, uneasily aware she was not saying anything. He had been ready for fury, a slap even. That would have made it easier. He was dreading a sob. Silence left him helpless.
‘And you’re not making them for me?’ she whispered suddenly and savagely. ‘Look at me! Look!’ It was a rhetorical question, in the darkness, but he could see the odd flash of flesh and white linen as she strove to tuck her disordered clothes back together. Her voice was gravelly with controlled misery. ‘I’ve never let any man do that, not even the least any girl might! You think I don’t know who I am? You think I’m not reminded of that every time I see some snotty serving-girl enjoy a little slap and tickle with the first lad who ventures? You think I didn’t know whose hands those were, or what I was doing myself? Any man! Ever! And you have the raw cheek to turn all principled upon me You … Northerner! Nothing but salt cod in your belly and the Ice in your veins! I should have known I was wasting my time!’
‘Not that!’ His hands gripped her shoulders. ‘There’ve been other women, but what I felt about you … what I feel … never anything like that. I never knew I could. That was why. I’m not going to drag you down, too.’
The Castle of the Winds Page 33
